The semiconductor fabrication industry continues to increase integrated circuit (IC) design density, reduce device sizes and reduce power consumption. Parasitic losses continue to be an area of concern.
A major component of leakage power includes the power consumed by transistors when they are not actively switching. IC designers seek to improve the leakage power consumption of an IC without impacting its performance characteristics. In a modern IC design, pre-designed standard-cell libraries are used to provide the components from which an IC is synthesized and optimized. The leakage power consumption and the performance characteristics of the IC depend on the standard-cell library used.
Various IC designers may choose to optimize their products for particular applications. A designer may wish to qualify its IC under different temperature and voltage conditions than those used to characterize the standard cell library.